Chapter 503: Operation: Save The Beast Goddess [I / Bonus - ]

Chapter 503: Operation: Save The Beast Goddess [I / Bonus Chapter]

Snow exploded into fine powdery plumes behind eight pairs of driving hindquarters as the Blessed Wolves tore through the frost-crusted drifts.

The concussive thud-thud-thud of padded paws hammering against petrified shale sounded like heavy artillery firing at a steady tempo.

The biting wind of the Umbral Basin screamed past Silas’s ears, whipping the fur trim of his coat against his jaw but the micro-current of heat circulating beneath his collar kept the sub-zero air from biting into his lungs.

Up ahead, low in the saddle of her mount, Tasmin raised her left arm with her black leather gauntlet cutting cleanly through the freezing gale.

"Boundary in three hundred meters!" she called back, her raspy voice carrying sharply over the howling squalls. "Decelerating to column order!"

Riding bareback atop Titan with her long legs casually flanking the Alpha wolf’s ribs, Thor blinked her storm-blue eyes.

The divine warrior tilted her head, her blonde locks whipping into a golden halo around her broad muscular shoulders.

"Boundary?" Thor echoed, her voice booming over the rush of the wind without an ounce of strain. "What boundary? We’ve been running across cold gravel for an hour, Silas! Has the dirt changed flavors?"

Beside Aurelia’s wolf, the Princess sat upright in her saddle, her gloved fingers tightly gripping the reins.

Her azure eyes were wide, darting between the towering dark conifers lining the ridgeline and the horizon where the mountain peaks jagged into the bruising clouds.

"Is it a perimeter ward?" the Princess asked, her tone carrying a breathless, girlish thrill. "Like a demarcation line? A defensive threshold from an old war?"

She looked thoroughly enamored with the concept, sitting with her back straight, fully leaning into the feeling of an elite deployment.

To someone who had spent her entire sheltered existence locked behind palatial balconies and formal tea rooms, the terminology sounded like something pulled straight out of a modern thriller.

"Hehe~"

From the head of the column, Silas let out a slow frosty breath, watching the white vapor dissipate over Valkyrie’s twitching silver ears.

"Nothing that poetic," Silas said, pulling slightly on the leather straps to bring the pace from a thundering dead sprint down to a controlled ground-eating lope. "The ’Boundary’ is just the term we stamped on the maps back at the Keep. It marks the outer perimeter of our territorial reconnaissance limit... Up to that stone ridge fifty paces ahead, my women have scouted, cleared, and mapped every fault line, cave mouth, and diamond vein."

He pointed a gloved hand toward a massive fissure running horizontally across the valley floor, where two split granite pillars stood like broken teeth jutting from the permafrost.

"Once we step past those pillars," Silas continued, "we’re off the map so none of us have set foot beyond that line."

From the front, Tasmin pulled her mount parallel to Valkyrie, flashing a crisp confident thumbs-up over her shoulder.

"We pass the perimeter at the gorge my Lord... Past this, we’re walking on virgin soil."

Silas reached down, patting Valkyrie’s thick muscular neck with a gloved palm. The Blessed wolf let out a deep rumbling chuff of acknowledgment, her golden harness humming softly against her chest.

’It would be simple to just unleash Thor,’ Silas thought, his blue eyes drifting back to the blonde demigoddess who was currently trying to see if she could catch falling snowflakes on her tongue while balancing on the Alpha’s back. ’We could hand the bird to her, tell her to ride the lightning, and she’d cover forty miles in ten seconds... She could drop out of the stratosphere, crack the Forever Ice with a celestial shockwave, throw the Beast Goddess over her shoulder, and be back at the Keep before lunchtime.’

He mentally shook his head, clamping down on the thought before it could take root.

’No. Bad habit...’

Thor was an incredible combat asset which was an overwhelming wall of divine muscle and atmospheric devastation, but she wasn’t his soldier.

She wasn’t bound to his territory and she wasn’t a registered Hero of Blessed Land.

She was a wandering divine entity who had essentially hitched a ride with the royal girl because the royal girl kept her belly full of prime pork and sweet dwarven ale.

When the Princess’s week expired and she returned to Earth, Thor would walk right out behind her. And who was to say she would ever step foot in this basin again?

’I can’t let the territory become reliant on an outside god,’ Silas reminded himself with his jaw setting firmly. ’Relying on borrowed power dulls your own edge... The moment you build your operational framework around a weapon you don’t own, you’re already writing your own obituary.’

Maybe during the next Hero summoning, the world would grant him a flight-capable aerial deity of his own.

But until then, they moved on their own legs, measured their own steps, and solved their own problems.

As the pack crested the gravel ridge, the granite pillars loomed over them, casting long lightless shadows across the snow.

Silas drew Valkyrie to a complete halt, turning his head to look back at the Princess’s mount.

"From here on out," Silas announced, his voice dropping into a disciplined tone that carried across the eight riders. "We follow the bird’s navigation... We’re taking the paths of least resistance, routes with minimal monster packs but keep your eyes wide... I want to study their migration patterns. All those monsters and shapeshifters that keep leaking south toward our side are bleeding out from this sector. I want to know what’s pushing them."

Aurelia nodded serenely, her golden eyes scanning the jagged timberline with quiet vigilance.

"Understood, Lord Silas."

"I have the rear flank," Morwenna added, her dark gray eyes sharp as flint beneath her heavy traveling cloak and her fingers resting lazily against the silver pommel of Tidebringer. "Nothing slips through my draft, Captain."

On the Princess’s shoulder, the obsidian bird let out a sharp clicking clack of its scythe-beak.

The moment Valkyrie’s front paws crossed the imaginary line between the two shattered pillars, the avian launched into the freezing air with an explosive beat of its dark wings.

FLAP-FLAP-FLAP!

The bird surged forward, leveling off ten feet above the snowdrifts, banking hard into a sharp sweeping ninety-degree right turn that cut straight into a dense forest of black-barked pine.

"Follow it!" Silas ordered, nudging his heels into Valkyrie’s flanks.

The Blessed Wolves surged forward as a cohesive unit, vaulting the horizontal rock fissure and diving headfirst beneath the suffocating canopy of the northern tree line.

The interior of the northern forest was different from the light airy woodlands surrounding the southern borders of Blessed Land.

Here, the trees did not grow straight... they twisted like petrified bone, their charcoal-black branches tangling overhead in a dense suffocating web that choked out nearly all daylight.

The sub-zero wind that howled across the open plains died to a sinister stagnant hush, broken only by the crunch of heavy paws and the unsettling drip of dark moisture falling from dead needles.

The deeper they pressed into the lightless grove, the heavier the atmospheric pressure became.

It was an oppressive crawling sensation... the distinct feeling of cold hostile eyes pressing against the back of one’s neck from every shadow.

The bark of the trees was scored with grotesque, unnatural claw marks, and the smell of snow was tainted by the coppery tang of dried blood and stagnant swamp water.

Silas exhaled a slow, controlled breath with the skin along his arms prickling.

’There are dozens of them,’ Silas thought, his eyes tracking the micro-movements of the dead brush thirty yards to his left. ’They aren’t hunting yet so my guess is that they’re observing...’

He reached into his tunic, lightly tapping his collarbone with his thumb.

FZZT!

From beneath the dark silver-threaded weave of his cloak, a warm, radiant crimson sphere drifted out into the frigid air.

Kael-Drin popped into existence with a cheerful melodic chime that sounded like tiny glass bells.

The fist-sized spirit hovered around Silas’s neck, its translucent ruby shell pulsing with tiny flecks of pure gold mana.

Feeling the cold malignant stares lingering in the dark pines, the spirit’s core suddenly flared with sudden protective heat, tiny sparks of crimson fire dancing along its surface.

"Easy, Kael-Drin," Silas murmured softly, raising a single finger to let the warm sphere bump gently against his knuckle. "Keep it quiet. Don’t broadcast our heat signature unless I tell you to light them up."

The spirit’s pulsing stabilized, letting out a soft obedient hum as it settled down against his right shoulder, resting beneath the heavy hood of his cloak like a radiant warm brooch.

Silas turned his head slightly toward Eluned, who was riding smoothly to his left with her emerald braid resting neatly over her shoulder.

"Elu," Silas asked quietly, his voice barely carrying past their mounts, "are we even remotely close to the trench?"

Eluned closed her eyes for a brief second, her consciousness dipping into the soil beneath the permafrost, probing the dormant root systems of the basin.

When she opened her emerald irises, she offered a slow reluctant shake of her head.

"Not yet, my love," Eluned replied, her melodic voice laced with quiet caution. "The signature of the Forever Ice is vast, but it lies deep within the geological rift... We must penetrate at least fifteen miles further into the basin’s core before we reach the descent lip."

From overhead, banking low through a gap in the twisted black boughs, the obsidian bird let out a harsh sound.

"SQUAWK! Krrr-caw!"

"Tch. Even further, huh," Silas grunted, pulling his fur collar tighter against his throat.

He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, expanding the spiritual perception anchored within his Mythic Gold Core.

The golden mana circulated outward in an invisible spherical pulse, sweeping across the dark forest floor.

Within a three-hundred-meter radius, he picked up forty distinct biological signatures.

Most were low-tier scavengers... blind burrowing abominations hiding beneath the roots, waiting for scraps.

But lingering just at the edge of his range were larger mana signatures.

’If we can just maintain a clear path, we can reach the lip before dusk,’ Silas analyzed. ’A direct march without burning resources on minor skirmishes is optimal.’

Reality, however, had zero intention of cooperating.

As the pack rounded the moss-rotted trunk of a shattered ironwood, the landscape abruptly shifted.

The crisp freezing air suddenly grew thick and suffocatingly humid. From the hollows between the tree roots, a dense milky-white fog began to bleed upward from the earth, swirling around the wolves’ paws like living creeping tendrils of vapor.

Within seconds, the mist rose to their waists, drastically cutting their visual range down to less than fifteen paces.

"Heads on swivels!" Tasmin’s sharp command sliced through the silence.

The commander dropped her center of gravity, her twin void-daggers sliding from their sheaths with a whispering shing. "Visibility is dropping fast so thermal and shadow signatures are blurring!"

SHSHSHK!

Barely three yards above Silas’s right shoulder, the dead bough of a black pine cracked.

From the swirling white fog, a grotesque sickening projectile lunged through the air straight toward his throat.

It was roughly four feet long... a pale fleshy segmented creature resembling a bloated eyeless earthworm, but its circular maw was lined with five concentric rings of serrated needle-like bone teeth that dripped with clear paralytic mucus.

Silas didn’t even flinch.

CLANG-SHING!

His right arm blurred into a golden arc.

The golden mythril longsword cleared its scabbard with the deafening shriek of drawn steel.

Before the worm’s jaws could snap shut, the radiant blade cleaved cleanly through the center of its segmented body.

SPLAT!

The two severed halves of the monster tumbled onto the snow, twitching violently as dark foul-smelling fluid sprayed across the white crust.

RUSTLE-SNAP-CRACK!

The single strike acted like a tripwire.

All around them, the suffocating canopy of the black pines erupted into violent coordinated motion.

Dozens of the segmented worm-aberrations began dropping out of the branches like disgusting fleshy rain, their circular maws gnashing in high-pitched wet chittering sounds.

"Eep!" The Princess gasped, reflexively drawing her void-iron dagger, bracing herself behind Aurelia’s flank.

"Hold your ground," Morwenna’s dry voice cut through the rising panic.

The Pirate Queen casually reached across her chest, her calloused fingers wrapping around Tidebringer but she didn’t draw the weapon.

Her gray eyes flickered with a cold, lazy glint.

’Heh... let’s look cool.’

She popped the crossguard forward with her thumb by a single solitary inch.

CLICK.

SHING-SHING-SHING-SHING-SHING-SHING-SHING!

An invisible terrifying storm of vacuum blade-air detonated outward from the seam of her scabbard.

To the mortal eye, she hadn’t moved an arm.

But in the space between two heartbeats, hundreds of razor-thin pressurized crescents of oceanic wind-mana spiraled upward in a howling vortex, shredding the space above the column into a butcher’s block.

CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP!